DIY : Removing Carpet Tack Strips

Anyone who’s removed carpet will tell you, it’s not the carpet that’s a pain to remove, it’s the timbers and staples that hold the carpet in place. When we removed our old carpet over timber flooring we used the following tools:

Using the utility knife, cut the carpet into manageable strips and roll up to remove.

The same is then done to the underlay.

As the underlay is stapled to the floor you need to use pliers or a pry bar to remove them (it’s especially important not to miss any if the floors are being sanded after).

Removing the timber carpet tack strips was something that I hadn’t done before so prior to starting I searched YouTube to find out the best and easiest way to handle the job.

Karah from The Space Between blog had by far the best of the videos I found and therefore was the one I followed – trust a chick to show the most straight forward way to do the job! Check out the vid here:

Tip #1 – Find where the timber is nailed in to the floor below. Using a pry bar and hammer, tap into the bottom of the timber where it’s nailed in to the floor until it lifts. Follow along under all of the nails and then lift the remove the whole piece. If you tap and lift between the nails chances are the timber will crack or break making it harder and take longer (which we don’t want).

Using this technique all the timber came out quite quickly and easily, I even got my 6 year old doing it with ease (she is the renovator girl!)

It was actually kinda fun, there’s something about a pry bar and a hammer that’s a good stress reliever 🙂